MLK in a speech on Vietnam in 1967

Guys, I was reading this speech that MLK made on Vietnam back in 1967. He always amazes me. People take him for granted as some kind of pop-cultural icon, but he was SO smart and SUCH a man of God. We forget that he was a Baptist minister like Mike Huckabee and a PhD who could analyze domestic and foreign and military policies like Barack Obama, and a Nobel Peace Prize winner like Al Gore. If you have the time or the inclination, read or listen to the whole speech at:

http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/mlkatimetobreaksilence.htm

Here are a couple of excerpts. Try this- read this first one and think about the run up to the Iraq war back in 2003-04. And replace when you read either the first one or the last one, replace Vietnam with Iraq and replace communism with Islam. Remember Jesus said to love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.

Let us not join those who shout war and, through their misguided passions, urge the United States to relinquish its participation in the United Nations These are days which demand wise restraint and calm reasonableness. We must not engage in a negative anticommunism, but rather in a positive thrust for democracy, realizing that our greatest defense against communism is to take offensive action in behalf of justice. We must with positive action seek to remove those conditions of poverty, insecurity, and injustice, which are the fertile soil in which the seed of communism grows and develops.

Somehow this madness must cease. We must stop now. I speak as a child of God and brother to the suffering poor of Vietnam. I speak for those whose land is being laid waste, whose homes are being destroyed, whose culture is being subverted. I speak for the poor of America who are paying the double price of smashed hopes at home, and death and corruption in Vietnam. I speak as a citizen of the world, for the world as it stands aghast at the path we have taken. I speak as one who loves America, to the leaders of our own nation: The great initiative in this war is ours; the initiative to stop it must be ours.

This is the message of the great Buddhist leaders of Vietnam. Recently one of them wrote these words, and I quote:

Each day the war goes on the hatred increases in the heart of the Vietnamese and in the hearts of those of humanitarian instinct. The Americans are forcing even their friends into becoming their enemies. It is curious that the Americans, who calculate so carefully on the possibilities of military victory, do not realize that in the process they are incurring deep psychological and political defeat. The image of America will never again be the image of revolution, freedom, and democracy, but the image of violence and militarism (unquote).